Efficient and Authenticated Key Agreement Mechanism in Low-Rate WPAN Environment

Abstract

Generally sensor network and wireless ad hoc network use a symmetric key agreement scheme, although this mechanism has some problems, such as key management, complex network deployment and configuration. This is because the devices of sensor network have limitations such as power, memory, processor speed and implementation cost. The public key algorithms are considered to be too expensive in term of memory and processing requirements. In Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN), we propose a new key agreement mechanism using the Security Manager (SM) for public key management based on the EC-MQV algorithm. And also, we define two security levels by means of device's power and security policies in the network. We have measured the performance of this mechanism and at the same time meeting the low implementation cost and low power.